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Friday, November 04, 2016

“The bullpen will be interesting to see how it comes together,” Williams said. “The market is going to make it challenging. There is not a ton of options available, and there are a lot of teams talking about needing bullpen help right now. We just have to be careful that we don’t get swept up in a market that is overheated. We’ll monitor that market and try to find value.”
Creative bullpen management was in focus throughout the postseason, with managers not being afraid to go to their setup men in the middle innings and closers as early as the seventh to finish games while throwing 40-50 pitches.

Sunday, October 02, 2016

“Personally, until (Mike) Trout came into the league, I thought every year that I would be in the conversation for best player in the game and he f——-d that up for everybody,” Votto said. “Babe Ruth and Ted Williams included. He’s ruining it for everyone.”

Friday, September 30, 2016

It was a weird end. Watching the game, I agree with the umps. Price waited too long.

Molina stepped to the plate with two out and the potential winning run on first and ripped a ball to left field. It bounced off the warning track and hit a panel of signage beyond the wall before caroming back into play. A throw from left fielder Adam Duvall was too late to get Carpenter, who slid into home to initiate the celebration.

Statcast measures the exit velocity of Yadier Molina’s double and Matt Carpenter’s max speed as he scores the game-winning run

As the Cardinals carried that celebration into the dugout, the Reds remained on the field wanting to challenge that the ball should have been ruled dead—and Molina, therefore, awarded a ground-rule double—when it hit the signage. Reds manager Bryan Price waited too long before requesting a review, and the game officially ended.

“In this situation, Bryan Price did not come up on the top step,” crew chief Bill Miller told a pool reporter after the game. “We stayed there. I waited for my partners to come off the field. I looked into the dugout, the Cincinnati dugout, and Bryan Price made no eye contact with me whatsoever, and then after 30 seconds he finally realized, somebody must have told him what had happened, and we were walking off the field.”

Tuesday, September 20, 2016

. Somehow the Reds have been the only staff in MLB history to post a cumulative WAR below the replacement level. Not every Cincinnati hurler has been historically bad — Anthony DeSclafani has done admirable work, leading the team with 1.9 WAR, and Raisel Iglesias has 1.3 WAR with a superb 3.30 FIP. But by the logic of the theory that underpins WAR, the Reds’ sub-replacement tally means they could have stocked their entire pitching staff with nothing but freely available fringe players and AAA callups, and they’d have won an additional game. To find another team that could say that, you’d need to hark back 127 years (!!) to the 1890 Pittsburgh Alleghenys, whose 23-113 record still stands as second-worst in the long annals of major-league failure.

But that’s just according to FanGraphs’ model of WAR, which parcels out pitching credit (or, in this case, blame) based on FIP. Baseball-Reference.com’s competing WAR model2 uses runs allowed — a fielding dependent statistic — as its starting point, before accounting for a pitcher’s defensive support using fielding metrics. Oftentimes, the two varieties of WAR will be in agreement, but they do not see eye to eye on Cincinnati’s place in baseball history: According to the B–R version, not only are the Reds not the worst staff ever, but their 4.3 pitching WAR is only the fourth-worst tally of 2016.

With Jason Heyward‘s eighth-inning two-run home run off of Blake Wood on Monday night, the Reds set a new ignominious record, CSN Chicago’s Patrick Mooney reports. The club has now allowed 242 home runs, surpassing the 241 the 1996 Tigers yielded. ....

Brandon Finnegan has allowed the most home runs on the team with 29 followed by Dan Straily at 28. Because the Reds have struggled to keep other pitchers in the rotation, eight other pitchers have given up double-digit home runs including five who have made at least 10 starts.

Coming into Monday’s action, Major League pitching had allowed 5,218 home runs. The Reds’ 239 at the time represented 4.58 percent of that total. The Twins had allowed the second-most at 209, or 4.0 percent. By the way, that 5,218 total was already the sixth-highest total in major league history. Thank you, Reds.

Monday, September 19, 2016

On the year, the offense is nothing special. The Reds are No. 9 in NL runs scored. But as anyone still following the once-miserable Redlegs can attest, it’s a different team from the first half.

The post-All-Star break Reds rank top-five in runs scored, having plated more runs than both the Chicago Cubs and the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Of course, runs scored is hardly a tell-all metric. But even a more granular look into the Reds offense reveals more evidence of the team’s ability to score with the NL’s best. On the entire year, the Reds rank No. 12 in wRC+. But since the break, the Reds rank No. 3 in wRC+ and are just one of three NL teams over 100 in that category….

Plenty of players share responsibility for the team’s dramatic turnaround. Of course, everyone remembers the brutal start of Joey Votto, who hit .200 in May. He finished the first half hitting .252, still an impressive feat considering his start.

Votto is hitting .401 for the second half and is starting to generate MVP whispers.

Wednesday, September 07, 2016

The Reds’ latest splurge into the Cuban free-agent market culminated on Wednesday, when the signing of pitcher Vladimir Gutierrez was completed. Gutierrez was at Great American Ball Park on Tuesday for his physical, which he passed before the signing was made official. It is a Minor League contract, and the right-hander will not occupy a spot on the 40-man roster.

MLB.com’s Jesse Sanchez reported on Aug. 30, via an industry source, that the Reds and Gutierrez had a $4.75 million deal. Gutierrez, who hails from Pinar del Rio, Cuba, turns 21 on Sept. 18.

Tuesday, September 06, 2016

“The Reds came to me very early in the process and asked me where I wanted to go and I gave them three places I wanted to go and New York wasn’t one of them.

Seth Lugo keeps Mets rolling in 5-1 win over Nationals
“But that has nothing to do with the Mets or New York or anything like that. I had personal ties with places I wanted to go. It ended up not working out.”

What places? “San Francisco, Texas and L.A.,” Bruce said.

So is he upset to be a Met? “Absolutely not. I got a chance to come play in a playoff race and I’m so happy to be here. Things get misconstrued. Yes, New York was not on my list initially, that’s really all there is to it. Definitely wasn’t as comfortable with New York as I was the other places, but I’m happy to be here and we’re doing exactly what I hoped to do when I got here.”

Monday, September 05, 2016

Fatherhood has not hurt Bruce. He isn’t losing sleep or wasting energy changing diapers. Actually, he was still in Cincinnati when he became a father and was having a great year. Then they traded him to New York and his numbers declined in a New York minute. I was told when he knew he would be traded he went to the Reds and asked them to trade him anywhere but to New York. Guess they didn’t hear him right and thought he said, “Please trade me to New York.”

Tuesday, August 23, 2016

With his hitting skills, Senzel could be on the fast track to the Majors. He watched with interest as three 2015 first-round picks were recently promoted to the Majors in their first full pro seasons. That included overall No. 1 pick Dansby Swanson by the Braves, No. 2 pick Alex Bregman by the Astros and seventh pick Andrew Benintendi by the Red Sox.
“You’re always hopeful. You look at those guys ... get there their first full year, as a player and a college hitter that makes you hungry to get up there,” Senzel said. “I feel like different organizations have different plans. Whatever their plan is, you have to trust the process. At the same time, you want to do well at every level you’re in and move up as fast as you can.”

“I spend so much of my time, days, preparing how to say something to a guy in two minutes,” said Bannister, the Red Sox director of pitching analysis and development. “The bulk of my life is trying to take something very complicated and being able to tell it to my 4-year-old son (Atley) or 7-year-old daughter (Brynn). If I can tell it to them, then I know it can be explained quickly to somebody else.

“That’s always the goal. You’re not trying to make it complicated, you’re trying to make it actionable so somebody can go out and use it at the highest level of competition.”

Thursday, August 04, 2016

UPDATE: 8/4/2016: Friedl signed today for about $730k. Since the initial publication of this article, scouts have contacted me and alerted me that they knew he was draft eligible (though it’s clear some teams didn’t), as did Friedl, but that Friedl wasn’t going to sign after his R-Soph year unless he got the kind of money that he ended up getting today from the Reds. Scouts who saw him this spring didn’t think he was worth that sort of bonus. Scouts who saw him this summer however, did.

Sunday, July 24, 2016

Reds fans couldn’t help but think the Griffeys should’ve reunited in Cincinnati. Junior’s ancestral connection to the Big Red Machine explained a lot of the fervor over his eventual homecoming. Just as important was his star power, which transcended his sport in a way that doesn’t really happen in baseball today. (Try to imagine local news helicopters tracking the homecoming of, say, Dallas-born Clayton Kershaw.) Griffey had endorsement deals with Pepsi, Nabisco, and AOL; he had a hugely popular video game; he had a sprawling relationship with Nike, seen most famously in the ads that pushed “Griffey for President.” And yet, in an era when TV money had not yet semileveled the playing field, baseball’s most famous player chose to go to Cincinnati, one of the game’s smallest markets. To make that happen, Griffey agreed to a team-friendly extension: a nine-year deal for $112.5 million that made him just the seventh-highest-paid player in the game (And that didn’t even account for the fact that more than half of the money was deferred.) “If the player owns a Rolls-Royce and he chooses to sell it at Volkswagen prices, that’s his right,” agent Scott Boras groused. The contract’s details reportedly moved Bud Selig to the verge of tears.

Wednesday, July 20, 2016

The left-hander is still searching for his first victory at this level, something he knew he wasn’t getting when he stayed in the dugout of a 2-2 game in the seventh, but he did look more like the prized prospect the Reds believe him to be. His record still stands at 0-4, but his ERA dropped from 8.39 to a slightly less unsightly 6.75.

Friday, July 01, 2016

Cincinnati Reds outfielder Jay Bruce has the Cleveland Indians listed as one of eight teams on his no-trade clause, but according to a friend of Bruce, he only added the Indians as the eighth team as a late replacement for the Blue Jays after hearing Toronto was interested (he apparently liked the idea of going to the Jays).

The friend says Bruce has no negative feelings toward Cleveland or the Indians and would be very likely accept a deal there.

Monday, June 13, 2016

The Reds have reached an agreement with No. 2 overall draft pick Nick Senzel and will sign the Tennessee third baseman for a $6.2MM bonus later today, reports MLB.com’s Jim Callis (on Twitter). The second pick came with a value of $7,762,900 this season, meaning that Cincinnati will save $1,562,900 on the pick. That money can be reallocated to other picks further down the team’s draft board.